Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Europe

He who lives in the past cannot advance.
– Mies van der Rohe, 1924

Reinvention may be the only shared trait of geniuses. When the usual trajectory of a life conflicts with long-held beliefs a true artist has pursued, it’s often necessary to create another path. Because Mies van der Rohe did, he changed the direction of Modernism, and after World War II, forever altered the look of cities.

Aachen

Born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany, Maria Ludwig Michael Mies no doubt accompanied his parents to the city’s ancient cathedral every Sunday. It had been built on the remnants of Charlemagne’s eighth century Palatine Chapel, the first “Romanesque” structure. Looking around its accretion of dissonant styles, from Carolingian and Proto-Romanesque to Gothic and Classical, with no surface left undecorated, Mies may have fantasized from an early age to clean up its visual cacophony.

When he was school-age, Ludwig’s stonemason father sent him back to the cathedral’s equally ancient academy and on to a vocational school for builders. Though he never graduated, at 14 he found work in two provincial design firms as an apprentice but was never more than a draughtsman for them. It was only later that he realized that the architects were nameless to history. Rather than regret that posterity would never hear their names, he felt that all medieval construction was a product of its epoch. This meant eventually that his own architecture should also be regarded as a metaphor of its time and not necessarily an ego-centric exercise. Aachen Cathedral 796-1165-1355-1449-1748

Berlin

By 1905, he left Aachen for Berlin and joined a suburban Rixdorf building office but was soon conscripted into the Kaiser’s army. That military interlude was quite brief, however, and he luckily landed back in the Berlin office of Germany’s leading furniture and cabinet designer, Bruno Paul.

Word had spread that he was a young architectural prodigy and shortly after joining the firm as a draughtsman, he surprisingly got his first commission to build an actual house. The exterior of the 1907 house for Alois and Sophie Riehl turned out to be quite conservative and, despite its stripped-down details, almost typical for the Potsdam area. However, the interior of the main floor was a much more modern update of English Arts and Crafts, nearly Japanese with its seven-foot wall paneling resembling shoji screens and somewhat closer to Mies’ later designs. Riehl House 1907

The Riehl house also utilized his first use of a distinctive platform on which the structure is set off. It, of course, was a way to define the separate ground levels between the entrance above and private garden below but it eventually became a way for Mies to reconcile differing sidewalk levels and recurs later on to act as the “pedestal” to place the sculpture of the architecture.

The Riehls liked their new house as well as Mies himself and financed a long trip to Italy for the talented young architect. Though he professed to love the ancient Roman aqueducts and the Renaissance villas of Palladio, he yearned to get back to the grey skies of Germany. When he returned, he was hired by the most famous architect of the time, Peter Behrens, in October of 1908, reputedly on the strength of the Riehl house. Riehl House interior 1907

Less Is More

Behrens was among the earliest industrial designers and had begun designing buildings for the German electric company, AEG. In 1909, Mies was put to work drafting (the word had assumed a new spelling) the elevations of the most utilitarian sides for the turbine factory building. While leaning over Mies’ drafting table, the young architect remembered Behrens uttering “less is more.”

Mies toured the Berlin area works of Karl Friedrich Schinkel from a century earlier. But he returned to work in Behren’s office by 1910 where the arrival of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio containing line drawings of his “Prairie” houses and modernist buildings may have caused Mies to rediscover his place in modern architecture.

He requested a leave of absence from Behren’s office to return to Aachen and prepare a competition entry with his brother, Ewald, for a memorial project for former German chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

Schinkel

Resembling both Schinkel’s and Wright’s work, his renderings of the cliffside Bismarck monument on a prominent stone platform may have been his best unbuilt building of the period. Though receiving a special mention, the design didn’t win the competition for its extreme cost and the monument remained only an idea on paper.

Schinkel’s work definitely influenced his second house of 1911 for art dealer Hugo Perls. Its main deviation from the 19th century architect’s Greek-revival villa elevations is a clipped hip roof of red Mediterranean tiles whose shape is more reminiscent of English Regency and a reminder of Mies’ willingness to break the rules of traditional architecture. Schinkel facade for Altes Museum 1823-30

Kröller-Müller House

Also in 1911, Peter Behrens received a commission from a Dutch modern art collector, Helene Kröller-Müller, for a house museum in the Netherlands. He left the details to Mies who famously got along better with Helene than Behrens. He then removed Mies from the project in April and the Kröller-Müllers subsequently dismissed Behrens.

Kröller-Müller rendering 1911

However, it was Mies’ design that was constructed full-scale in wood and canvas on the Ellenwoude estate. Even Mies’ hero, Dutch architect H.P. Berlage, was commissioned for a design. In the end, neither architects’ work was accepted past either of the earliest stages.

Whether it was the Dutch house contretemps or the outside projects or Behren’s turn toward stripped-down Classicism for his next design in St. Petersburg for a German consulate, Mies was driven from Behren’s practice, and in 1912, began his own.

Architectural Firm

After his incorporation, his first house in 1913, the Werner, was built next door to the Perls but was not influenced by Schindler and instead resembled a typical Prussian cottage. Its street front, however, is only the more vernacular appearance as the house addresses the extensive rear garden in an “L” shaped enclosure whose wing loggia of blocky columns is more prescient of what’s to come.

He didn’t sign the architectural drawings, though (they were signed by a Goebbels), presumably as his certification may have been delayed since he never graduated with an architectural degree. Mies also married Adele Auguste Bruhn (called “Ada”) in that year but the marriage only lasted until their separation in 1921. They had three daughters, one of whom became a researcher and curator at The Art Institute of Chicago. Werner House rear garden 1913

He had designed the lately rediscovered house for the Warnholtz family in 1914-15. But its vernacular appearance and destruction in 1960 had most likely hidden Mies’ involvement until 2001.

Since the war eliminated most brave clients willing to attempt a radically modern design, his 1915 house for the Urbig family of Neubabelsberg was also disappointingly conservative with its typical grand manor house appearance. It became known as “Churchill House” for its use by the English Prime Minister in 1945 at the Potsdam Conference. Urbig House 1917

Mies’ firm paused in 1915 for his conscription again into the German army where he was assigned to construction battalions in Frankfurt-am-main, Berlin, and Eastern Europe.

Experimentation

After the war, the austere 1919 tombstone for Laura Perls, the mother of Mies’ second house client, Hugo Perls, appears to have signaled a new Mies style. Set in one of Berlin’s Jewish cemeteries, its simple construction of rectangular shell limestone blocks decorated only with opposing directional graining set Mies in the minimalist look of his later fame.

Mies also designed several more expensive houses in a vernacular idiom at this time that we wouldn’t have found “Miesian.” But the German postwar austerity had nearly destroyed the market of modernist inclined private clients and, by 1921, Mies had probably had enough. He joined the “Novembergruppe,” a collection of like-minded artists founded in 1918 who were determined that Modernism wouldn’t pass them by. Tombstone for Laura Perls 1919

As his last name had obviously bothered him since childhood, he also reinvented his persona at that time. Since the name “Mies” meant “miserable” in German, he buried it in an extended surname. Since he couldn’t use the German “von,” strictly reserved for aristocratic class distinctions, he added the Dutch “van der.” The final “Rohe” was his mother’s maiden name. He also dropped his own “Maria” and “Michael” birth names.

Breakthrough

The renamed “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe” entered a competition for an office building of no more than 80 meters in height on the busy Friedrichstrasse in Berlin in 1921. Though the 33,000 Reichsmark prize and its jury of Berlin’s top businessmen were certainly compelling, his main objective for the design, codenamed “Honeycomb,” seemed to be polemical.

Friedrichstrasse project rendering 1921

Friedrichstrasse project plan 1921

Philosophically, Mies considered a high-rise tower to be most beautiful when still a visible steel skeleton and before enclosure in its masonry clothing. So he emphasized the cage and clothed “Honeycomb’s” 20 floors in see-through glass. Though his entry wasn’t drawn on prepared graph paper, its modular grid may have matched his own aesthetic and inspired his constant mental use thereafter.

Mies’ entry was dismissed by the jury but its very design seemed to unleash his stripped-down modernist approach. He followed the Friedrichstrasse design with a taller, rounded tower (called the “Glass Skyscraper”) for no particular site whose model was shown in a Novembergruppe exhibition in 1922.

Exhibitions

Though nothing substantial was being built anyway, the actual clients he was able to get weren’t ready for the radical looks (to them) that he proposed. Apparently caring little about the money in architectural fees he would receive for vernacular structures, Mies found that bypassing them entirely and instead exhibiting his modernist ideas in hypothetical designs widely seen in magazines, fairs, and competitions was more rapid and productive. Despite Berlin’s renown for the avant-garde, nothing modernist by Mies would be built there yet.

Other artists and architects also dealt with the lack of clients as well and decided to invent a magazine called “G” (short for Gestaltung, translated to “formation” or “creative organization”) and its first issue was in July of 1923. In it, Mies drew a large rendering (also displayed at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1923) for a long concrete office building. Subtly expanding in floor area as it rose to only eight stories, the building defied building commission constraints on height by presenting a building as big as a skyscraper without actually being one. Concrete office building drawing 1923

The same year’s exhibition in Berlin saw him displaying the 1923 rendering and a model (also pictured in the September 1923 issue of G) of an extravagant ferroconcrete mansion for the country. It was a cubistic fortress meandering around a courtyard that nearly found a client (most likely from this exhibition).

The drainage of the flat appearing roof is usually an imperceptible tilt behind a parapet. Used in Mies’ Concrete Country House design, it employed an inward slanting roof similar to butterfly canopies seen in railroad platforms for decades. The secret of a “flat” roof is that only the visible straight parapet hides the tilt behind it. An aerial view exposes the trick. Concrete Country House model 1923

It would be a mistake, however, to see Mies’ more modern work as merely “formalistic” or designed only for its look. At the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1924, he exhibited a charcoal sketch of a “Brick Country House” but made sure it also included a plan drawing, the most conceptual of building designs. Though the plan eerily resembles a DeStijl painting, it told astute viewers that Mies saw the brick walls as straight line load-bearing supports, eliminating their sense of enclosure. With the long walls built well beyond the structure itself, the viewer’s eye is then directed out the windows and far out into nature.

Brick Country House rendering 1924

Brick Country House plan 1924

Mies’ overriding attempt for his new stripped-down approach was to make “Almost Nothing” architecture that is often referred to as “Baukunst” or building art. To historians, the Brick Country House was also a continuation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s integration of nature and is the distillation of “Organic Architecture” to Mies.

Ryder House Possibly thanks to the exhibition, he actually designed the brick flat roofed Ryder house in 1923 in Wiesbaden, Germany, to be built for a boyhood friend. A new owner significantly altered Mies’ design in 1928 to a more vernacular, hipped-roof, look. Ryder House drawing 1923-27

Wolf House

As he may have assumed, his next private clients, though, were too conservative in their taste and commissioned him to either remodel vernacular houses or build them from scratch. He had more luck with his 1925 call from Erich Wolf, a wealthy textile manufacturer and art collector, who gave Mies carte blanche in his modernist design for a house in what is now Poland.

Having to be more specific than merely polemical for an actually constructed brick house, and to enrich his use of the material, he used Flemish bond for the vertical walls and Spanish bond for its horizontal paving.

Wolf House 1925-27

Wolf House from entrance 1925-27

At the time of the architectural design of the Wolf House, Mies also worked closely with Lilly Reich, whom he had probably met the previous year. Reputedly having studied with Austria’s Josef Hoffmann at the Wiener Werkstätte and longtime member of the Deutscher Werkbund, she converted her fashion and decorative sense into interior and furniture design and became his partner both in life and in several design collaborations.

Nearly destroyed by Soviet bombardment in 1945, parts of the Wolf House remains have been a modernist ruin since that time but it has since been debated whether it should be reconstructed as a Mies icon.

Alternatives

Mies bypassed the single-family house, and its conservative client, with housing developments that had no specific owners: The Africanische Strasse complex in Berlin and as artistic director of the Weissenhof Settlement in Stuttgart, both from 1925-27.

Specifically concerning the latter, built for the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition: the 21 buildings comprising 60 dwellings consisted of multi-unit apartments and single-family homes. The designs were parceled out by Mies to German designers including Walter Gropius and Peter Behrens, Dutch architects like J.J.P. Oud and Mart Stam, the Swiss/French Le Corbusier, and architects from Austria and Belgium to demonstrate the new Modernism. Africanishe Strasse apartments 1925-27

Mies reserved the multi-unit structure looming over the exhibition now known as the Weissenhofsiedlung Apartment House for himself. It was the first time he used a steel skeleton in any building allowing for bigger windows, open interior spaces, and cantilevered canopies on the rooftop terraces. As well, the Africanishe complex and especially the large Weissenhof exhibition in Stuttgart were considered the first mass appearances of what became known as “The International Style.”

Also in the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition, he and Reich designed the more immersive “Glass Room” that placed the viewer inside one of his maquettes rather than the usual exhibition method of being outside a drawing or model. Actually consisting of three glass-walled spaces with sparse modernist furnishings, the Glass Room marked a turning point for the architect as the fully reinvented Ludwig Mies van der Rohe exhibit became the progenitor of his famous “Barcelona Pavilion” two years later.

Weissenhofsiedlung Apartments front 1925-27

Weissenhofsiedlung Apartments rear 1925-27

In 1926, before the completions of the two housing developments, Mies designed and finally built a Berlin cemetery monument. As Germany had been roiled by unrest at the end of the Great War in 1918, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the two leaders of the Communist party, had been on the losing side at the beginning of the Weimar Republic and were summarily executed in 1919. In his symbolic depiction of the rifle-blasted wall behind them, he employed twisted “clinker” brick for what was Mies’ version of an abstract wall.

Transition

Mies also built a perfect Georgian house for Georg Mosler in Neubabelsberg that historians recognize as the final vernacular work before Mies severed himself from historical designs completely.

Probably through Lilly Reich’s connections within the fashion industry, she and Mies co-designed the “Velvet and Silk Café” retreat made from hanging swaths of black, orange, and red velvet and gold, silver, black, and yellow silk dividing his modernist MR chairs for the 1927 exhibition hall of “Die Mode der Dame” in Berlin. Velvet and Silk Café 1927

Consequently, Mies was commissioned in 1927 to design the conjoined modernist houses of the like-minded owners of one of the silk manufacturers, Josef Esters and Hermann Lange, of “United Silk Weaving Company” in Krefeld, Germany. Now combined as a modern art museum, the two cubistic houses were built of brick (though Mies wanted them both to be glass) in an English bond with driveways and terraces of basket-weave pavers.

Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht 1926

Esters/Lange Houses 1927

Edward Fuchs, the man responsible for the Liebknecht and Luxemburg monument in a Berlin cemetery, bought the 1911 “Schinkelesque” Hugo Perls House. In 1928, he commissioned Mies to add a modernist art gallery. The subsequent addition acted as a symbolic fusion of Mies’ old style to his new one.

Utopian The 1928 unrealized plan for Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, the 18th century Russian-named city center was, like Le Corbusier’s 1925 plan to replace Paris’ center with a row of skyscrapers, thankfully destined to be an unbuilt Utopian concept. At the same time, however, that may have exactly been Mies’ plan for the unbuilt Adam Department Store in Berlin as his glassy box was certainly meant to attract publicity. As a more buildable follow-up to his skyscrapers of 1921 and 1922, it became Mies’ first practicable design for an all-glass exterior wall. Adam Department Store rendering 1928

Barcelona Pavilion

Though it was almost an afterthought and merely commissioned to compete with the national pavilions of Britain and France, the world has not only forgotten those two exhibit buildings and the mostly historicist Barcelona International Exposition itself but has considered the German Pavilion to be one of the most iconic works of modern architecture ever built.

Because it was not to be a practical residence or shed snow from the roof and meant to last only the length of the exposition, it used merely the simplest form and most luxurious materials. It had also occurred to Mies that “Structure” and “Enclosure” were two distinct systems demonstrated as far back as the Chicago School of Architecture and this building and the concurrent Tugendhat House were his first applications of that format. Barcelona Pavilion from promenade 1929/1986

In July of 1928, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was awarded the commission by the German government to produce a pavilion for the Parc Montjuic site. His and the authorities’ ignorance of just exactly what is a pavilion worked to the betterment of Mies’ final result. In the end, though Mies built doors for it, they were laboriously removed every morning so it could remain totally open in the pre-air conditioning days.

Barcelona Pavilion front steps 1929/1986

Barcelona Pavilion entrance terrace 1929/1986

Barcelona Pavilion Tinian Marble 1929/1986

The pavilion itself was elevated on a travertine podium eight steps up from the main fair esplanade. When the viewer mounted the steps, he was encircled by simple travertine walls around a large green glass-edged reflecting pool whose bottom was lined with river rocks. Opposite this view was the entrance to the partially enclosed pavilion.

There were three types of stone veneers used: Roman travertine marble for the exterior podium, interior floor, and outdoor walls with two kinds of dark green marble for both interior walls that were to be seen close-up with dark green composite and exterior walls to be seen from a distance, made of green Tinian marble wrapping around the inner black mirror-lined reflecting pool. And with tinted and etched plate glass and African Onyx Doré for a single spectacular interior wall, the building would definitely be considered “Baukunst.”

As the Weimar Republic client asked for the red, black, and yellow colors of the national flag, Mies obliged by centering a velvet pile black rug, placing a red velvet drape along the front window, and showcasing the golden hue of the swirls of the Onyx wall while ignoring their requested golden eagle. The white hovering plane over the pavilion itself was supported by eight mirror-finished chrome-jacketed cruciform columns. Barcelona Pavilion from front terrace 1929/1986

Speaking structurally: Polished chrome jackets encased the eight columns, each made of four bolted angle irons that held up the steel grid inside the plastered white roof/ceiling. The travertine veneered wall of load-bearing steel gridwork supported an identical white plane of the separate office roof.

Opening May 20, 1929, King Alfonso XIII and his wife, Queen Victoria Eugenia, sat on Mies’ and Reich’s throne-like chairs. Now called “Barcelona Chairs,” they resembled modernized Roman “Cerule” chairs that consisted of welded bar steel frames and white kid biscuit-tufted cushions. 75 centimeters deep, wide, and high. They’re nearly perfectly proportioned cubes and, along with their matching stools, are rarely used today (in copies) for seating and instead have become visual symbols of Modernism itself. Barcelona Pavilion from park 1929/1986

The royal accolades added to the building’s worldwide acclaim but after the exposition ended on January 15, 1930, German officials rushed to dismantle the pavilion and sell off the steel for scrap. The marble and onyx walls were recycled and Mies and Reich quickly safeguarded the furniture.

Barcelona Pavilion interior 1929/1986

Barcelona Pavilion interior and inner pool 1929/1986

In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of Mies’ birth, Spanish architects reconstructed it to more long-lasting specifications and installed an even more flamboyant book-matched onyx wall for its reopening in 1986.

Villa Tugendhat

Grete and Fritz Tugendhat were newly engaged in 1928 and as a wedding present, Grete’s wealthy father gave them a new house on a site carved from his estate in what is now the Czech Republic. Her initial interview with Mies in the Summer of 1928 occurred because Grete was a friend of Edward Fuchs and had admired Mies’ Perls house of 1911 and his recent art gallery addition.

Tugendhat House construction 1929

Tugendhat House rear view 1930

The Barcelona Pavilion had not yet been built when the Tugendhats commissioned Mies to build a house for them on the site in Brno, Czechoslovakia.

The architect had been impressed with Brno’s construction world so he leaned heavily on their know-how. Originally, Grete admired the burnt-brick of the Wolf house in Guben and requested a house of that material. But as clay deposits around Brno were not suited to fine-face brick, a steel skeleton, concrete, and infill walls of plaster-coated brick masonry were used instead.

To shore up the hill and provide an anchorage for the steel cage behind it, a deep concrete wall near the street was first poured. Three stories of steel skeleton on a concrete pad hold up the structure.

The street front of the Villa Tugendhat appears as a one-story building with a flat roof. It holds the entrance hall and five bedrooms for the family and their nanny to the left with garage and chauffeur’s quarters to the right. But cascading down the hill behind the simple appearing structure lie two more floors containing a huge open plan living room, conservatory, dining area, kitchen, and bedrooms for a cook and two maids, with an expansive 8,000 square foot utility level underneath. Tugendhat House interior 1930

In that basement utility area, in addition to a laundry, darkroom, and fur storage, was machinery for an air system filtered through cedar shavings for humidified, purified, and surprisingly fragrant air.

Among the enormous plate glass walls of the principle living level cantilevered about five feet from the vertical columns, two were large glass windows that electronically retracted into the floor and the utility level below.

Because Mies had an extravagant budget, he outfitted the house with nearly the same accoutrements as the Barcelona Pavilion, including freestanding chrome-finished X-shaped columns (the entrance column and the two for the exterior dining terrace were bronze finished) and a honey-colored Onyx wall (actually, five thin slabs of Moroccan calcium carbonate) that glows red when the winter sun sets behind them.

In addition to these, he added an exorbitantly expensive curving wall of Macassar ebony to partially enclose the dining area; Palisander veneered doors, equally expensive rosewood veneers, custom zebra-wood and ebony furnishings, and wall paneling for the study area and master bedroom; and an expanding round dining table of black pear-wood on a hydraulic mirrored column base.

The entrance stairs and floors of the foyer and winter garden (conservatory) were covered in travertine marble and the main living floor expanse was laid with white linoleum. Throughout the house were blue cane “MR” (including one red velvet upholstered MR Chaise Longue), bright green “Barcelona,” and what became known as “Brno” and “Tugendhat” chairs in white sheepskin and leather. Also, his “X” table in chrome and glass made its first appearance. The concrete slab ceilings were plastered as were the exterior brick infill walls originally with a sand-colored finish. (Everything has since been painted white.) Tugendhat Chair 1930

The building was finished and the Tugendhat family moved in December 1930. No record exists of Grete’s father’s comments after the bills were sent to him. But whether Grete was his favorite child may be immaterial as she (and this house) probably cost him the most.

Wall Street

The October crash of 1929 in America provoked nearly immediate fallout for the German economy. American investors quickly called in loans, leading to an unemployment crisis and the near-collapse of the Weimar Republic. Mies had thought his path to success was ensured by his architectural triumphs but the world financial crisis of 1929 changed his artistic direction.

Mies entered several competitions, submitting another (shorter) concept for a Friedrichstrasse office building of several lobes. None won the competitions. He also lost one important commission for a house in Berlin for painter Emil Nolde, but did receive a 1930 commission for an art gallery addition to a 1911 house in Essen. Friedrichstrasse building competition sketch 1929

Once again employing the electrically-lowering plate glass window (this time: 25 feet across) in the addition, its complete disappearance into the ground and the interior and exterior travertine marble floors united his indoor and outdoor spaces.

Bauhaus

Mies saw the writing on the wall, however, and in 1930 accepted the directorship of the Bauhaus to become the third and final director of the famed design school. His immediate predecessor, Hannes Meyer, had been forced out by local politicians for his openly Marxist views.

Mies’ appointment moved the needle decisively toward architecture in the curriculum. Lilly Reich was put in charge of the weaving department. Paul Klee had left and Wassily Kandinsky barely kept the painting department intact. Bauhaus Dessau aerial view 1925

The new director also dressed the part, adopting bowler hats and even a monocle for a time. His weight increased and he was rarely pictured without a cigar in all his subsequent photographs. His transformation into the Mies van der Rohe known until his death was complete.

By 1932, a new Nazi-aligned city council closed the Dessau building and ended its state funding. Mies financed a move to a Berlin-Steglitz telephone factory and an ownership change to private funding. The regime then searched the new building, interrogated Mies, and caused the faculty to permanently close the Bauhaus in April of 1933. Bauhaus Dessau building 1925

Apartments

Mies and Reich designed three apartments in Berlin and New York during his first Bauhaus year of 1930. The New York City apartment of Philip Johnson in the new Southgate Complex at 424 East 52nd Street in New York was Mies’ first commission in the United States.

Philip C. Johnson was a wealthy Alcoa Aluminum heir who eventually became the first chairman of the Department of Architecture and Design of the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 and Mies’ design partner for his most important commission in New York City in 1956. Johnson also brought Mies’ work to the museum in early 1932 for his group show on the new building called “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.” Philip Johnson apartment 1930

For this commission, Mies and Reich had no choice but to work as a team with Johnson, outfitting the one-bedroom apartment with modernist “Miesian” (and Reich’s) furnishings. Though there had been advanced Art Déco interiors in the 1920s throughout New York and parts of America, this was the first “Bauhaus” décor.

Nothing is known of the Hess apartment, but several commissions were generated from Mies’ earlier associations with the Krefeld houses for Josef Esters and Hermann Lange. Mildred Crous was a daughter of Lange who hired Mies and Reich to redesign her huge Berlin apartment on the third floor of a new building. The apartment was designed in the modernist style over its nearly 11,000 square feet quite at odds with the building’s historicist look.

To approximate an open plan, they demolished the existing wall between the living and dining rooms and filled the space with the Crous family’s treasured Barcelona and Tugendhat chairs, Reich’s custom made “Mies” daybed, and her chromed tubular steel bedroom furnishings.

Synergy His Krefeld connection led to another Esters/Lange project beginning in 1930. The two entrepreneurs unified several silk weaving companies and commissioned Mies to design the large VerSeid AG factory in 1931 along with its several later additions. All were constructed of plaster coated, load-bearing brick but in the main building, two floors of mostly Gropius looking multi-paned windows were topped by a third office floor of several “Miesian” fixed plate glass clusters over hopper openings. VerSeid factory 1931

Exposition

Also in 1931, the German government defied the dismal economic conditions by producing the “Berlin Building Exhibition,” consisting of an outdoor village of materials and foreign exhibits and an indoor exhibits hall in which was held a Mies-produced “Exhibition of the Modern Dwelling” with Lilly Reich in charge of the exhibits.

Mies invited a few modernist architects, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, to build some exhibit apartments within the Modern Dwelling building in the exhibit hall. And he designed a luxurious apartment inside the building for a bachelor. But the primary focus became the mock-up of the architect’s design for a one-story house. As if 1929’s Barcelona Pavilion were a proper dwelling with kitchen, bath, and bedrooms, the lack of any need for weatherproof materials kept this exhibit house purely conceptual. The two bedrooms for the hypothetical childless husband and wife remained open to each other, separated by a rounded bathroom compartment whose monitor-type clerestory windows above signaled the only use of that device and inserted a rare curved wall in a Mies building. German Building Exhibition Hall 1931

Lemke House

After spending time in 1932 on the unbuilt two-level Gericke house overlooking Lake Wannsee, Mies accepted the small house commission from manufacturer Karl Lemke in what became East Berlin. Though certainly not as grand as the Tugendhat, it nevertheless used the same grade outdoors as indoors (though the Tugendhat house grade levels descend down a hill).

The simple design of English bond reddish brick for the right-angled blocks in an L-shaped plan of two wings addresses the back courtyard from wide multi-pane windows and doors extending the apparent size of the two main rooms down to the view of Lake Obersee. Lemke House 1932-33

Unfulfilled

Mies tried unsuccessfully to win various competitions either for private house commissions or projects for the new Nazi government. Shortly after the rise of Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, Mies submitted a highly modernist design for the new corporate headquarters of the Reichsbank consisting of a sleek, curving entrance block and three ten-story slabs of offices behind.

In 1934, he also entered into the competition for a giant pavilion for the Brussels Exposition of 1935. This would have led to his biggest building at 729-feet-square. This time, he drew a tiny eagle and two indistinct swastikas on one of the renderings. He lost both competitions. Brussels Pavilion sketch 1934

His two brick and glass house designs of 1935 in Krefeld for Hermann Lange’s son, Ulrich, failed to get past the drawing board. But either the dire financial situation or the poor fit of his architecture to the regime’s request for grand, Classical buildings adorned with large swastikas and eagles eliminated much of Mies’ architectural work.

He was only able to design one apartment until he left Germany for good. His second daughter, Marianne, and her husband, Wolfgang Lohan, moved to the suburban Berlin community of Rathenow where Mies and Lilly Reich helped to decorate and furnish their new apartment. But especially after his extensively designed 1937 VerSeid AG factory administration building remained unbuilt, he probably knew his architectural future in Germany was over. Lilly Reich daybed circa 1930

America

He had come from a working class background to work in traditional architecture and design offices, finding traditional clients for traditional houses but he couldn’t quite shake his artistic need for order and simplicity. After journeying into a new Modernism with groundbreaking designs for competitions and exhibitions, he slowly found only a few clients willing to journey along with him.

Though the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s certainly contributed to his career trajectory, it was most likely the political shift and design incompatibility of the Nazi government in Germany that propelled his decision.

A few legendary buildings and unbuilt projects had told the world he was ready for his next step. That next step, though, would lead him away from Europe and into the “new” world.

Part 2: America